US homes upgrade to broadband

More and more US households are ditching their second phone lines and replacing them with broadband services or mobile phones, according to a survey from Gartner.

Analysts found that almost six per cent of all US households between January and June this year replaced a second phone - used for dial-up net access or a fax machine, for example - with a new service.

More than half (55 per cent) of these upgraded their phone lines with broadband services resulting in the creation four million new broadband subscribers.

The rest opted for a mobile phone package which, with competitive-prices, makes second phone lines redundant.

Said Gartner's Peggy Schoener: "A significant segment of the additional residence lines were never used for voice communications but rather for dial-up Internet access and faxing, so they were a natural market for upward migration to newly available and affordable forms of data communications."

"Additionally, the increasing mobile nature of society together with competitively priced, technologically viable wireless offerings have diminished the requirement for multiple wired access lines for voice communications," she said. ®